by Charles Baxter
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Product Description
Late one night, a man wakes from a bad dream and decides to take a walk through his neighborhood. After catching sight of two lovers entangled on the football field, he comes upon Bradley Smith, friend and fellow insomniac, and Bradley begins to tell a series of tales--a luminous narrative of love in all it’s complexity.
We meet Kathryn, Bradleys’ first wife, who leaves him for another woman, and Diana, Bradley’s second wife, more suitable as a mistress than a spouse. We meet Chlo? and Oscar, who dream of a life together far different from the sadness they have known. We meet Esther and Harry, whose love for their lost son persists despite his contempt for them. And we follow Bradley on his nearly magical journey to conjugal happiness.
Amazon.com Review
Among literary cognoscenti, Charles Baxter has a well-deserved reputation as one of America's finest writers. Best known for his short stories, Baxter has also produced three novels. His fourth, The Feast of Love, combines the best of both genres--with a light dusting of metafiction to sweeten the dish. The book begins with Baxter himself waking from a nightmare and going for a moonlit walk through his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. While sitting on a park bench, he is joined by an acquaintance of 12 years--and, incidentally, one of the main characters in the novel. It is Bradley who gives Baxter the name for the novel he's currently struggling to write, and even offers himself as a character: You should call it The Feast of Love. I'm the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I'm an expert on love. I've just broken up with my second wife, after all. I'm in an emotional tangle. Maybe I'd shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome. But why stop there? Bradley goes on to suggest that he send people to Baxter, "actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while. Everybody's got a story, and we'll just start telling you the stories we have"--a sly tip-off to the reader of this elegant, quirky, and wholly engrossing novel that the writer may be no more reliable than his narrators. What follows is a chronicle of love--the mad kind, the bad kind, and the kind that sustains us when everything else is gone. In addition to Smith, we meet Chloé, a young waitress at Bradley's espresso bar, and her ex-junkie boyfriend, Oscar; Bradley's next door neighbors, Harry Ginsburg, an elderly professor of philosophy, and his wife, Esther; and Kathryn and Diana, Bradley's two ex-wives. The characters take turns narrating, often commenting on and correcting versions of events mentioned by other characters in previous chapters, and occasionally advising Baxter on the progress of his novel: "Don't threaten people, especially lawyers" legal eagle Diana warns "Charlie" shortly before she launches into her own story. "Don't threaten your own characters. It's for your own good. You'll wind up in a mess of litigation and... subplots." But in The Feast of Love, God is in the subplots--Oscar and Chloé's involvement in the porn industry; Esther and Harry's agonized relationship with their mentally ill son; Bradley's travails in love, art, and dog ownership. As the novel progresses, these separate strands gradually merge, and not even an unexpected tragedy can dim the luster of this moonstruck romance. For by the time Baxter brings his tale of love and loss and redemption to a close, his characters have all found their way to the feast--bittersweet though some of the dishes may be. --Alix Wilber
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Sharing a Feast of Love, 2008-10-15
Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love is a novel that should star Kevin Spacey in its movie version (a Google search just revealed the book was made into a movie last year; Kevin Spacey wasn't in it). Or at least the subdued Bradley W. Smith, whose narrative voice is central to a multi-voiced meditation on love, would ideally be cast as Spacey in a movie version of the book.
Spacey tends to play the middle class lonesome loser who sort of redeems himself, or gains something by the end of the film. Like those many Spacey characters -- I'm thinking specifically of American Beauty, without all the darkness of that comedy -- Bradley is the lonesome loser type, a manager of a mall coffee shop, who loses two wives, but in the end gains, at least for a brief moment, the love he's searching for.
Using multiple narratives, Baxter plays a metafictional game, opening the novel with the novelist Charlie Baxter trying to write a novel: the novelist then goes about interviewing the characters, and the characters then go on telling the story with multiple voices. Baxter masters the multiple narrative, without losing the reader.
Bradley's narrative is central to this novel: the coffee shop he manages -- Jitters -- draws in several of the other characters: Esther and Harry Ginsberg (though they also happen to be Bradley's neighbors), Diana, and Chloe and Oscar, all of whom, in turn, relate their own love stories. Bradley's love life is also a narrative hub around which the other narrators circle, from which they then branch out on their own narrative spokes, sometimes relating their own stories, sometimes commenting on the lives of others.
Bradley's love-lost-love-gained narrative also generates the thematic arc of the other characters, the most interesting of which is the love-lost-love-gained story of Chloe and Oscar, a young punk-rock couple with, oddly, middle-class aspirations. Both abandoned by their families, they pursue a tragicomic, vaguely Romeo-Juliet love story, Oscar's father Mac Metzger -- the Bat -- serving as both Montague and Capulet, forbidding, yet never stopping, the couple's love. Their story serves the theme, deepening its meaning. Unlike Bradley, Chloe never loses at love; it's never brief, even when it's threatened by the sinister-yet-ridiculous figure of the Bat.
Even the appearance of loss -- Oscar's death -- doesn't deter Chloe or her love. She works through her grief, encouraged by love, by her belief that somehow Oscar will return to her.
"Once someone has bound your heart," she says, "he's the only person who can let it loose again. I'm waiting, Charlie (the novelist). I'm patient. I don't ever want my heart unchained, except by him."
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Wry, 2008-10-05
I really enjoy ensemble works like this, in which so many characters get to voice their thoughts, and they all connect with each other. Baxter has a nice style, with wry humor, adjectives which also fit the principal character, Bradley.
Love in its various facets is the thematic link of all the sub-plots, just as the park and coffee shop are the physical links. The amount to which Baxter relies on fantastic sex to move things along bothered me a bit. More to the point, I happened to see a Tom Stoppard play last night, "Rock and Roll", which in a brief scene between husband and dying wife was so much more profound about the nature of love than anything in this novel.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 The Ensemble Novel, 2008-08-17
Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into an excellent film with Morgan Freeman. I've just finished reading the novel, finding it charming and moving. Rather than focusing on a single protagonist, Baxter coaxes together a wonderful ensemble of characters, each recounting his or her own amorous tale.
The unifying device is the notion that each character is speaking to the author, Baxter himself, as he seeks out people to tell him about their encounters with Cupid. Baxter is deft in creating the unique voice of each character, and perhaps he's at the top of his game with the character of Chloe, a latter-day flower child who broke my heart and then put it together again.
Chloe experiences the extremes of sexual love--the ecstatic highs and the gloomy lows--the highs with her boyfriend and then husband, Oscar, and the lows as she is accosted by Oscar's father, whom the two kids call The Bat. While people like The Bat remain unredeemed, most of Baxter's characters are transformed and elevated by love. This is true even of Diane, whom we first meet as a cynical and predatory lawyer. Baxter is again brilliant as Diane's words reveal her inner being in ways that she herself does not fully understand--and as they slowly reveal her changes. One of Baxter's recent nonfiction books is called The Art of Subtext, and there is plenty of subtext to Diane.
Books like Baxter's (another is Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch) alter the traditional notion of the novel as the narrative of a single character's experiences--novels with titles such as Tom Jones, David Copperfield, Emma, and Daniel Deronda. The ensemble novel widens it's focus to show us how the stories of various characters mingle with and transform one another. These novels, it seems to me, have at their core the deeply ethical perception that in human relations there is no single, privileged point of view. Andre Dubus makes a similar point on a smaller scale when his short stories (or many of them) refuse to remain merely with one person's perceptions.
If the modernists thought it was careless craftsmanship for a writer to "violate" the one point of view established at the start of the story, writers such as Baxter, Dubus, and Bausch show us that it is a moral necessity to acknowledge various view points.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A Fabulous Feast, 2008-08-05
A gorgeous, lush, heartbreaking, glittering exploration of romantic love in all its forms. The style takes a little getting used to, but once you're in, you're hooked as Baxter spins you through the lives and passions of a handful of related characters. Rich, wise, and funny, the book is a feast indeed.
If you haven't seen the movie, read the book first -- the film is excellent, and very faithful, but you'll enjoy the book more if you come to it clean.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"i just didn't think it was that good, did you?" , 2008-05-07
Thank goodness for places like Amazon, where anonymity allows us to scratch our heads and slowly look at each other and finally say, "I just didn't think it was that good--did you?" The central concept of this book was a solid one, and throughout are many flashes of good writing and genuine insight. But overall it was hectic and messy and overwritten. Baxter's cutesy, mannered prose almost made me give up altogether on more than one occasion. Some of the characterization was interesting and believable, but again much of it was hackneyed or unconvincing. Has Charles Baxter ever actually known anyone who was working class?--you certainly wouldn't know it by his portraits of Chloe or Oscar, two of the least convincing examples ever created for fiction. At the end the book did work for me--which is why it received three stars rather than two--but only after reminding me of a racer painfully hobbling across the finish line with a piano on his back.
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